New month means new goals and I’m ready to tackle mine for this month. We’re almost halfway through the year and I haven’t done a very good job of working through my 2017 New Year’s Resolutions. Because of that, I haven’t written too many goals out. However, these goals definitely require some explaining. So, let’s hop right into it.

||June Goals||

Write 10 minutes per day

I’ve been trying to do this for months and I’ve failed literally every month. But now that I’m much less stressed, I think I can actually get through this for the whole month. I’ve also failed with this goal because I haven’t made it a real priority, but it’s definitely one now.

During this 10 minutes of writing, I’m not allowed to work on anything other than a creative writing piece. Blog posts and note taking don’t count, it must be a fictional piece. I’m not allowed to worry about formatting or proper paragraph structure during that time either. I’m only allowed to write.

Start Studying Organic Chemistry

Even when I say I’m out of school, I’m not.

Next semester I’m going to be taking Organic Chemistry and everyone I’ve talked to has said it’s an extremely difficult course. I want to give myself a fighting chance and at least expose myself to the information before classes start.

My plan is to go through the Organic Chemistry playlist from The Organic Chemistry Tutor. I’m not planning on self-teaching O Chem at all, simply because every professor is going to approach the content differently. However, I do want to be familiar with a majority of the terms and have a general understanding of the material.

This is the goal I’m least looking forward to because everyone makes O Chem sound like hell on earth. And because I really wanted to just spend my summer pleasure reading, and now I can’t.

Apply to 5 Scholarships

I’ve been seriously slacking off on finding scholarships. I know I’m the queen of saying “don’t stop looking for scholarships, there are a million out there for students already in college”. But I’ve learned some things during the past. A lot of college students don’t stop looking for scholarships because they don’t think there are any out there. They stop because they don’t have the time to apply to scholarships. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people who don’t realize that there are scholarships. But I think it’s mostly a time management and priority issue.

At a minimum, I have to apply to 5 scholarships, regardless of if they’re merit based or not. And at least 2 of them need to require an essay. I included this caveat because scholarships that require essays usually have fewer people applying for them, thus giving me a better chance.

Read More Conservative News Outlets

In the past couple of months, news outlets have gotten increasingly more polarized. Or at least, I’m beginning to notice how polarized it’s always been. Because of it, I rarely watch cable news. And I avoid reading anything that isn’t by the New York Times, BBC, or the Washington Post. I feel like I’ve fallen into the same cycle that a lot of the world has fallen into. We hear one side of the issue, base or ideas and responses based on that one view, and then attack the other side. We don’t stop to hear their side on the issue, rather we assume that because of some arbitrary label, they’re opinion must be completely different from my own and – more importantly- it must be wrong. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken.

I, as an American citizen, and we, as people of the world, need to understand both sides of the coin before we take form opinions on an issue. We need to be willing to hear to ideas that are entirely in contrast to our own, even if it’s only for the purpose of building stronger arguments against them. More than just hear the other side, we need to really listen to their arguments and try to understand their point of view. My solution? Take in news sources from all sides.

Since I’ve been doing a pretty good job of getting news from the right, I need to add conservative news outlets to the repertoire. How? I plan on relying pretty heavily on All Sides, a website that rates the bias of a variety of media outlets and places stories from the right, left, and center that deal with the same information side-by-side. It’s a relatively new website, but the premise is absolutely amazing. We’ll see how good of a job it does in the next coming weeks. I’m hoping it’ll introduce me to news outlets that are different from my regulars so that I can do my own research instead of relying on it.

This goal is probably the goal I’m most excited to tackle. I think my perspective on a number of issues is going to change, simply because I’ll be exposing myself to other people’s thinking. Ideally, this goal will get me to think about issues from angles that I wouldn’t normally think about.

Those are the goals for this month. It’s a pretty short list but each of those goals is going to pack a powerful punch of motivation and perspective. More importantly, I think they’ll help me start forming habits that I actually want to have. What about y’all?

What are your goals for this month? Are any of them related to classes you’ll be taking next year? Any recommendations for conservative news outlets?